declaration of arrays remains a total mystery
I have been making some progress in porting my IEC ST code from Horner-subspecies
to PLCnext...
I have zero clue how to declare arrays and / or strings
there are no instructions in the help system nor cues in the variable editor
It is such a common concept, it should be obvious how to declare them
Comments
To declare an Array or a custom-length string (ie anything other than max 80 characters) you must first create a type definition for the array or string type, in a Data Type worksheet. That type can then be used to declare a variable in a Data List table in a POU.
You can create a new Data Type worksheet by right-clicking on the Data Types node in the Components area,.on the right of the PLCnext Engineer window.
After that, the PLCnext Engineer Help gives a pretty good explanation, including examples.
Wow.. Thank you...
I had already read those help pages but didn't extract and groc enough information to figure it out...
First create a type in DataTypes Then create a variable in DataList Then create/reference the variable in the PoU
Now I would have assumed that a type definition could be used for multiple arrays but apparently not...
I had first created a type definition like this: tMB_MJx_Status : ARRAY[0..3] OF UDINT;
I could then create an array variable MB_MJ3_Status in DataList...
when I attempted to create array variable MB_MJ2_Status in DataList it failed - turned into BOOL
I just caved in to the idiosyncracies and created separate typedefs:
tMB_MJ3_Status : ARRAY[0..3] OF UDINT;
tMB_MJ2_Status : ARRAY[0..3] OF UDINT;
What is the scoop on that ?
Here are screen shots from PLCnext Engineer using the Array and String examples shown in the help.
Type definitions:
Variable declarations, including multiple variables of the same type:
Variable usage:
This is how one type definition can be used to declare multiple variables.